"non-commercial use" by a corporate entity

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JB Lowe

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Mar 25, 2010, 2:22:39 PM3/25/10

to The New York Times Annotated Corpus Community

Hello,

I'm an NLP researcher, formerly associated with a university, now
working for a startup (recently we incorporated as a Delaware
corporation).

I submitted an abstract to a conference to do a study of named
entities in different types of corpora, and I said the NYT Annotated
Corpus would be one of the corpora we used.

One of the things my company is doing is analysis of news documents,
so the paper (and the use of the corpus) would be *related* to the
company's mission.

However, we would not and will not be using the corpus in the course
of business, and the paper is really intended as an contribution to
computational linguistics, me returning to frolic in the pastures of
the academy.

I checked with the folks at LDC and of course they can't speak for the
"data creator" and so their responses are perforce pretty general.

Presumably the folks at the NYT read this group, so I wanted to see if
I could get someone to say that this would be a permitted use -- I
found out that this corpus has a separate EULA from the usual non-
member LDC agreement, and I quote the salient bit here:

"1.1. The Data may only be used for non-commercial linguistic
education, research and technology development, including but not
limited to information retrieval, document understanding, machine
translation or speech recognition."

http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Catalog/nonmem_agree/New_York_Times_Annotated_Corpus_User_Agreement.html

Anyone have insights or opinions on this?

Regards,

John Lowe
www.johnblowe.com

JB Lowe

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Mar 25, 2010, 5:49:11 PM3/25/10

to The New York Times Annotated Corpus Community

Update: LDC followed up with the data provider, and I'm happy to
report that they say "the data provider [...] has not expressed any
concerns" about this use. Cool!